Rumble in the Jungle (+ 30)
Ali, Foreman, and the Congo
by Mickey Z.www.dissidentvoice.org
October 26, 2004

I
won $4.00 betting on Muhammad Ali when he fought the pre-grill George
Foreman for all the marbles in the wee hours of a 1974 Zaire morning. This
was a time when most white kids would regularly root for Ali to lose...so I
took advantage of such nonsense and put my money on The Greatest.

Today, as we approach the
30th anniversary of what became known as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” far
more is known about the boxers (and a certain promoter named Don King who
got his start in Zaire) than the venue.

The Congo gained
independence from Belgium in June 1960. Within three months, the CIA helped
overthrow the African nation’s first Prime Minister, the charismatic and
legally elected socialist, Patrice Lumumba.

“Lumumba attempted to steer
a neutral course between the U.S. and the USSR—no easy task,” says author
Mark Zepezauer.

Captured with CIA help in
December 1960, Lumumba was “held prisoner for over a month, interrogated,
tortured, then finally shot in the head,” Zepezauer adds. “His body was
dissolved in hydrochloric acid.”

Four years later, thanks to
U.S. support, the murderous, corrupt, but most importantly, anti-communist,
Mobutu Sese Seko assumed power and ruled with, what William Blum calls, “a
level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers.”

In the name of
“authenticity,” Mobutu renamed the country the Republic of Zaïre, after a
local word for “river,” forced all his citizens to adopt African names,
introduced a new currency, and renamed many cities. Ali bought into the
façade of African-ness: “I wanted to establish a relationship between
American blacks and Africans,” he said. “All the time I was there, I’d
travel to the jungles, places where there was no radio or television, and
people would come up to me, and I could touch them.”

Ali apparently had no
comment about touching those housed in the secret detention cells under the
stadium where the fight took place or the criminals who were rounded up and
shot before the foreign press arrived. Sure, Mobutu was a murderer...but he
was “our” murderer.

“The Mobutu era began with
ardent U.S. support, financial and military,” says journalist Ellen Ray.
“From 1965 to 1991, Zaire received more than $1.5 billion in U.S. economic
and military aid. In return, U.S. multinationals increased their share of
the ownership of Zaire’s fabulous mineral wealth. On the foreign policy
front, Zaire was a bastion of anti-communism during the Cold War, in the
center of a continent Washington saw as perilously close to Moscow’s
influence.

As President Bush the Elder
put it, Mobutu was “our best friend in Africa.” In contrast, Norman Mailer
(on hand to cover the bout) called him “the archetype of a closet sadist.’’

Which brings us to October
30, 1974.

“The Rumble in the Jungle
was a fight that made the whole country more conscious,” Ali wrote at the
time. “The fight was about racial problems, Vietnam. All of that.”

Not quite, Muhammad. Thanks
to an acquiescent media, the general public’s knowledge of Zaire under
Mobutu was limited to stories about African support for Ali and the
rope-a-dope tactic the former champ employed to defeat Foreman. Many years
later, when the dictator had outlived his usefulness to the U.S., “all of
that” did come out.

“Mobutu’s corruption and
brutality were ignored for thirty years,” says Ray. “It was only when the
plunder of western-owned assets and the ruination of the country were nearly
complete, when Mobutu’s stolen billions had become a world-wide
embarrassment, that the U.S. began to seek an acceptable change.”

That’s when the corporate
media spin began to turn in the other direction and the public suddenly
learned all about Mr. Mobutu in a hurry.

“I may have lost that
fight, but I learned a lot from it,” sums up Big George today.